Mirror, Mirror

About

Mirrors and Beauty go hand in hand.  Originally an incantation in the Brothers Grimm 19th-century story Little Snow White and expanded upon in Disney’s version more than 100 years later, “Mirror, Mirror” has us questioning what beauty is and how it can be measured. Artists were invited to take the theme literally and look to the properties of a mirror, or as a metaphor for reflection on themselves, family or environment.   

Sharon Draghi’s project Split Tree Road is about her family and the place they live. In capturing quiet moments alone, as well as their shared life together, she is exploring ideas about privacy, intimacy, self-awareness and the passage of time. She observes how environment illuminates our daily lives, and how the suburbs she’s currently residing in can be simultaneously beautiful and sinister. 

Jennifer Loeber’s GYRLE series is an anecdotal observation of her friendship with a woman named Lorelei, a person she had met years earlier as a teenage boy named Mac. Loeber’s work focuses on representations of female identity and expressions that question the archetype of womanhood.

Tom Butler presents an alternative version of himself - six black and white self-portraits that are unrecognizable as such. He is interested in ‘conspicuous invisibility’, the twin human desires to simultaneously hide and perform. The portraits present his body in a way opposite to that of a mirror: he appears concealed, ambiguous and even monstrous.  

Zhiyuan Yang draws from personal experiences and self-identity. Her project A Family of Three is an auto-ethnography. The work chronicles the effects of hetero-normative ideas drawn from the fantasy of the happy Chinese family in contemporary social imagination. What is revealed is the impact of these constructed mythologies on individuals who are shaped and entangled with other lives.